The Give and Take of Global Teams

I’ve had the opportunity to work with many global clients and be on many global teams.  Many of you may find yourself in similar situations.  What I find interesting in each of these engagements is how global team coordination and communication occurs.  Over the years, I’ve come to observe three types of approaches

1)      The headquarters location drives the definition of workday (time zone) and all team meetings occur during this workday.

2)      Regional focus of activities drives the definition of the workday so team meetings during phases of the project may occur more conveniently during the regional workday

3)      Duplicate meetings are held to more conveniently meet regional time zones

Which one works best?  Well, actually a combination will work depending on what the objective of the meeting and the purpose the global team exists.  Let’s look at each approach.

Headquarters Driver

The headquarters driver approach sets a precedent that meetings will be held during headquarters working hours.  A big positive of this approach is team members generally know during what timeframe meeting would occur.  For those regions/countries that don’t have a large workday time zone overlap, the team members can request recording of the meetings to occur so they do not miss out on information exchanges or they can make personal arrangements to attend meetings in off hours.   The big negative, I find, is that there is a general feeling from the team of headquarters dictatorship vs. teamwork.  I am definitely not saying this is how all members of the team will feel as the intent of the team and meetings may warrant a more top down communication method.  If the purpose of the team, however, is to jointly make decisions that drive the results of the company or impact the company strategy, it will more likely feel like headquarters is really forcing alignment to their views – simply by sending the message that all meetings must be held during headquarters workdays.  

Regional  focus

Some projects lend themselves to regional focus meaning that activities conducted as part of the project tend to lend themselves to a specific region at a specific timeframe in the project.  Internal system implementations are one example, office efficiencies and process re-engineering is another.   If your project has this type of execution, then I’ve found that allowing the region of focus to drive the definition of a workday helps in two ways.  One, the region is not only the focus of the project based on the schedule, it becomes the driver of the project and scheduling meeting in the region time zone highlights that.  The other is the emphasis to the resources in that region that they have an important role at this time in the project.   The only real downside with this type of approach is adjusting the regular team meetings to be aligned with the regions are the project continues.

Duplicate meetings

There are times when duplicate meetings are worthwhile but I find that these present more challenges than advantages.  Meetings in which information is communicated outward such as corporate briefings are a good example of worthwhile duplicate meetings.  Project team duplicate meetings, however, undermine the concept of team.  Fragmenting the team into separate meetings puts more workload on a cores subset management team to not only coordinate multiple meetings and attend/facilitate those meetings, but to also gather, document, and share the dynamics of the meetings so no input among the team members is missed.   The only positive here is that the same basis meeting information is shared with the various attendees.

There is yet a fourth option which I originally heard mentioned by a Salesforce presenter at a TPSA conference – vary your project team meeting times to allow the sharing of ‘out of hours’ sacrifices that must occur to be involved in the team.   I had run global projects before and had been doing this out of courtesy when I heard this but that statement made me realize how much of a positive impact that has on the project team and commitment to the term ‘global’.   It’s worked well in my career so pass I’m passing it along…I’m just sayin’!